Not Even My Name

Not Even My Name is an eyewitness account of the horrors of a genocide in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian and Pontic Greek minorities in Turkey were killed during and after World War I. As told by Sano Halo to her daughter, Thea, this is the story of her survival of the death march at age ten that annihilated her family, and the mother-daughter pilgrimage to Turkey in search of Sano's home seventy years after her exile. Sano, a Pontic Greek from a small village near the Black Sea, also recounts the end of her ancient, pastoral way of life in the Pontic Mountains.

We had been on the road for so long that our money was gone. Clothes and household things were strewn on the road behind us, left because their owners had died or were just too weak to carry them further. People had taken to begging when we passed villages or towns. Some of the Turks along the way took pity, stuffing a piece of bread into an outstretched hand as we passed. Others just stared." p141.

...

We walked along in the dark stumbling on stones toward Karabahce. Now and then we were assaulted by the stench of death deposited on the road. I was glad I couldn't see the corpses lying there in the darkness, but I clutched Mother's arm in mine to give me courage. She walked along silently. Only when I felt a tear fall on my arm did I realize she was weeping.

'If we go on, we will lose them all.' Mother had told Father after Nastasia' death a few days earlier. It was then they had resolved to escape when we got the chance. p150.